Flashes
by kiaronna
Summary: Oneshots on each character of Fire Emblem 7. "Kent had learned that duty and honor shouldn't be a promise to someone else, but a promise to yourself, a devotion nearly akin to love and that is just as malleable." 2/44.
1. Lyndis

_A/N: And so begins my Fire Emblem oneshot collection! This will hopefully come to encompass a chapter per character on an issue or an idea that snags in my mind. Lyndis is naturally my first._

Names

Lyndis

Pride is one of the things that a Sacaean values most. Over pain, over prejudice, over even family and common sense. Sometimes over life. Pride is what forces the tired rider on into the endless plains.

And Lyndis of the Lorca has never been deemed worthy.

She did not realize this, not for years, until her childhood was beginning to slip away.

"I knew that the Lycian _princess_-" this is said in a way far different than her father's caressing tone- "would never bear a proper son of Sacae to guide the Lorca."

Though the tiny green-haired child knows that her father loves her- loves her more than the wind or his horse- she sees a spark of shame flicker in his eyes in these moments. It hurts in a deeper place than the words of cranky old women.

So she rides her horse better than any boy, she picks up swords instead of herbs, she tussles in dirt, lets the wind flow freely in her tied-back hair. And new shame is born alongside the praise.

"They call us the barbarians, yet that Lycian girl will never grow into an appropriate woman. Pretty as a wildflower, but still a _weed_."

Her hair grows long then, and she weaves and dances the tribal movements of old, and she waits until her chance to become the child that her father, the chieftain, needs.

* * *

Then everyone dies.

Her father's eyes will never watch her lead their people. Even the fragile remnants will not listen to her, the half-Lycian _girl_ with the odd-sounding name who tries to fill a position that a female never should. So when the bloodstained traveler appears in his robes, darker green than the plains that she has known, her pride knows she must follow him and find new soil to plant itself in, to grow upon.

When the knights show themselves, she feels Father Sky breathing his luck and love upon her. Lyndis, daughter of Madelyn and Hassar, can be someone. Lyn of the Lorca is more than a chieftain's failed child, a lonely survivor; she is offered the opportunity to be a lady, to find a new family and new lands to fall in love with. Finally, men will listen to her, will follow her command.

She arrives, and Lyn realizes that the plains she's crossed, the borders she's surpassed, the men she's killed and bloodied her white hands with, have meant nothing. All have been leading her in a sickening circle, as surely as the sun arcs in the sky.

Lyn of Sacae is a tomboy, a savage, a young and foolish girl once more. The Lady Lyndis of Caelin cannot ride a horse in the same fashion, or do her swordplay, or even _weave_-something that used to be so feminine- to prove her prowess as a woman. So she cries in the library for hours as Lycians ten years younger write out words that she's never even heard before with letters she can barely scrawl. She holds in wracking sobs when her maids don't understand her accent, when nobles mock her for not knowing the difference between her forks, when she falls in love with a man she can't have, when her grandfather continues his slow and withering path to death. Lady Lyndis stands strong and tries to be proud.

Lyn of the Lorca is no more a survivor, no more alive, than the rest of her tribe.

It's hard to be proud when you feel that you are never enough, when you flail powerlessly in the dark to try and grip a sense of self, a sense of society, and you find nothing. She will always be trapped halfway, a Lady that prefers grass to jewels and the whispering wind to the golden fan she now pathetically rotates with one wrist.

Sometimes she hates, and she doesn't know who.

So when the castle falls under siege and the red-haired man arrives with a new fate to hand her, the Lady of Caelin is shamefully, horribly, repulsively relieved.

But then they claim victory in the face of the impossible. Lyndis of the Lorca cannot and will not rebuild the stone walls that suffocate her.

Sitting with her husband on the plains and watching the dry grass fade to the yellow and brown of winter, Lyndis knows that here, under the quiet of the open sky, there are no expectations, and no judgments. In a place where only the wind can touch her, where only the wind can whisper behind her back or push her to new heights. It is now, in the ripples of her shameful elopement back to her home with a man she cannot have and the abandonment of her own country, that Lyndis feels the proudest.


	2. Kent

_A/N: Hi! Erm. Not as focused as Lyndis' was. I hope that you enjoy it anyway! Currently, I'm super obsessed with little!Kent. ...Bye now._

An Old Man Grows Up

When he was young, Kent had a temper. It was temporary, a quirk of his childhood years, but there was no end to the mocking he received for being the typical fiery redhead. When the other children were too loud, or immature, or disobedient, or broke rules, or played a game unfairly, Kent snapped. His tiny, young back would straighten and he would, seething, stiffen his little body into a straight line.

"Put 'im on a bow, and he'll fly true," said a neighbor once, a bully who stole bread from other children. This hadn't bothered the redhead. It was when he began waving his father's loaded bow around a circle of awed children that Kent had gone at the boy, both of their fists flying and the archery set forgotten. And Kent had lost.

When he was young, Kent was naïve. Kent was not naïve about hunger-Kent was no stranger to hunger's door- or hard work.

Kent was not even naïve about death.

No, what the young straightlaced man lacked was an appreciation of treachery. If he swore something, he meant it. And that unwavering devotion that was so true, so honest, was a terrible weakness.

He had seen the barracks of Caelin's castle once, and he had known then that he would be a soldier. Finally, there was a place where he could thrive, a place with schedules and men to whom loyalty was law. A place where others would obey the rules and regulations that anchored Kent in the chaotic world.

They were still just men, in the end, and Kent's glowing world was shattered. A quarter were Lundren's men. Another quarter would as soon raise his sword in defense of his countrymen as he would lower an unfinished mug from his lips.

Only one of them was actively _infuriating_.

He had heard of the recruit before. He was the one that winked at every chambermaid and liked to twirl his weapons about to show off, fancying himself a hero. He was just as naive as Kent had been, but he _wasn't changing_. In fact, he was getting worse, and Kent had to live with him.

"Good morning, partner," the green knight would say, with a cheerful slap on the back. "And what a lovely morning it is! The birds are singing, the wheat in the fields is whispering, the clouds are giving us a cool breath of a shadow, and I do say that the Lady Madelyn's portrait is winking at you-"

"_Sain_," the younger man would enunciate, and the older would grin.

The brown haired man was always bothering him, saying all of the things that he shouldn't in just the manner that he shouldn't, eyebrows and tongue waggling, but Kent was stuck with him. Kent was also, in a disgruntled and odd way, finding himself warming to his comrade.

Kent was a focused and procedural man. Sain liked to stare at the wind rustling through the trees surrounding Caelin's fortress and give breezy sighs. Kent saved his meager funds and carefully monitored everything he owned. Sain lost his own lance at least once a season, and never had the money to covertly replace it. Sain would have made a terrible spy.

And Kent couldn't talk-_flirt_- with a woman to save his life.

Sain had kissed more women on the hand than Kent had even talked to, and he was always silently-or not so silently- pressuring his favorite redhead to talk to them some more. Indeed, Kent had often wondered why the other man enjoyed teasing him so, why the green knight even enjoyed his strict and tense and _lecturing_ presence when it was clear that they were almost polar opposites.

It wasn't the sort of thing that men would ever, ever talk about, even in the dead of night, and so Kent would never know. In truth, the red and green knights complemented one another. Kent knew when to stop, and Sain knew when to start. They had a friendship deeper than Kent had ever known, than Kent could even recognize.

And then she appeared, another flash of stunning green in his vision.

Kent tried to stop.

"It's almost natural to love her a little," Sain said. "I do too. It's fine to start."

When he was old, Kent had learned. Learned how to live without a few fingers. A few former necessities. A few friends. A lot of honor. Kent had never been a naturally gifted man, but a man who had to work his hardest to achieve, a man lacking careless luck. Kent had learned that duty and honor shouldn't be a promise to someone else, but a promise to yourself, a devotion nearly akin to love and that is just as malleable.

And finally, much to Sain's delight, Kent had learned how to flirt with a woman, the only woman that mattered, a woman he honored.

"Will you be my best man?" He had blurted in an awkward fit of embarrassed honesty.

His green companion replied with a slap on the shoulder and a fond smirk. It made Kent's weary bones creak, but also curved his lips into a rare smile. "Haven't I always been, partner?"

Kent remembered his first impression of the man before him, and his second and third (admittedly, they weren't much better), and all of the times that the reckless, ridiculous man had laid down his life and his lance for him. They are far less naïve than the two recruits that joined the Caelin army years and years ago. They are hardened and ripped in more than a few places. And yet there they stand still, the sturdy red and the vibrant green, and the old knight is glad that he never had to learn to change Kent, in all of his frustration and intensity and devoted honor and pounding belief, to learn to change _himself_.


End file.
